THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATEMENT REALI1Y ANALYSIS

Udo Undeutsch
Department of Psychology
Umversity of Cologne
Herbert-Lewin-Str~e 2
5000 Koln 41, FRG
ABSTRACf. The development of the Statement Reality Analysis (SRA)
technique is described. The technique is employed to assess the credibility of
witness evidence in criminal cases. An expert psychologist is appointed by the court
in cases in which a child's evidence is central in criminal proceedings. The expert
interviews the child, other principals in the event, reviews the forensic evidence,
attends the trial and then renders an opinion to the court of the credibility of the
child's evidence. Procedures like SRA are employed in both parts of Germany and
in Sweden.
The chapter begins with a critical examination of eyewitness research and its limited
value in real forensic contexts. The origins of SRA are then traced from a court
decision in Germany in the 1950s to its full elaboration in the 1970s. The
assumptions underlying the SRA procedure are detailed and the procedure
outlined.

1. Historical Origins
Experimental research on the psychology of testimony was stimulated by the
awakening interest in individual differences at the turn of the century and by the
efforts to measure those differences. For example, Alfred Binet conducted
research on suggestibility (1900). He experimented with a wide variety of
suggestibility tests. Some of these tests were designed to study the influence of the
prestige of the experimenter. One of these tests, which has subsequently enjoyed
widespread use, was the "interrogatory" or picture report with leading questions.
He found that the phrasing of the question can influence the answer given. Like
many other investigators, Binet regarded modeling as a kind of suggestion. He
studied it by having children in groups of three answer leading questions in each
others presence, and noted to what extent the children followed the proposition of
the child who answered first. Having been a jurist before turning to psychology he
was aware of the bearing of his findings on the evaluation of testimonial statements
within the framework of criminal proceedings.
The real originator of expenmental research on the reliability of testimonial
statements was the German psychologist William Stern. At the beginning of the
century he conducted a considerable amount of research with adult and child
subjects. He was interested in the question of individual differences in ability to
report accurately and completely what had been witnessed. He ty{'ically presented
his subjects with pi.ctures (for example, of a farmer's living room). He asked his
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J. C. Yuille (ed.), Credibility AssessmenJ, 101-119.

© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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subjects at first to report what they had seen in a free narrative and subsequently he
asked questions regarding many details to be seen in those pictures. He also
studied the effect of different types of questions on the accuracy of the answer. He
summarized the outcome of his early experiments in the famous and often quoted
sentence: "Perfectly correct remembrance is not the rule but the exception" (1902,
p.327).
Stern very quickly realized the relevance of his findings for the evaluation of
witness evidence in criminal proceedings. His attention became focused on child
sexual abuse cases. Everyone dealing with the investigation of alleged sexual
offenses, whether the victIm is a child or an adult, has learned that the most
prominent peculiarity of those cases generally is the scant amount of evidence
available. The statement of the alleged victim is in the overwhelming majority of
the cases the one and only piece of evidence. This applies even more to child
sexual abuse cases, for the following reasons:
I. Since child sexual abuse is frequently nonviolent, with no physical force
employed against the victim, there is usually little or no evidence of physical
trauma to be found.
2. There may not be emission of semen nor any other physical evidence of sexual
activity.
3. Since deviate acts require secrecy, most sex offenders make efforts to arrange
privacy for their illegItimate sexual activities. As a consequence, the criminal
acts, as a rule, are not observed by non-involved onlookers; when witnesses
were present, they are likely to be other young children.
4. Perpetrators hardly ever confess unless they are persuaded that others believe
the child.
The statement of the victim is the irreplaceable and indispensable piece of evidence
that determines the outcome of the case. Assessing the truthfulness of the
statement of the alleged victim is crucial in sex cases.
In the development of the psychology of testimony in Germany, child sexual
abuse cases became and remamed the prominent focus. As he became more
involved in actual child sexual abuse cases, Stern realized that assessing the ability
of the victim-witness to report an event accurately and completely was only one
aspect in the complex of problems surrounding the evaluation of such complaints.
Other questions arose such as: How reliable are female witnesses reporting
illegitimate sexual activities, how reliable were adolescents in this respect'? No
findings from any kind of research on these subject matters were available at that
time. Stern, therefore, referred to millennia old prejudices regarding the
unreliability of women as witnesses, particularly as alleged victims of sex offenses.
Regarding the effect of puberty, he was under the influence of G. Stanley Hall who
gave the impression that adolescence is characterized by abnormalities of behavior
natural to that period and outgrown as the individual reaches a mature level of
development (1904). Between 1890 and 1920 psychologists believed that the
developmental stages of puberty and adolescence were phases of increased sexual
arousal in which the imagination of the young persons is focused on sexual matters.
In this emotionally charged, sultry atmosphere they were oftentimes not capable of
distinguishing between what they experienced merely in their imagination and what